Practical Magic: Adriana Gallo
Adriana Gallo, Installation while a resident at 77Art in Rutland, VT, 2019
Practical Magic is an online interview series with early and mid-career creatives. Through a selection of prompts we spotlight each person’s practice and (hopefully) prove art world creatives are the real influencers of today.
interview with: ADRIANA GALLO
visual artist
For the month of August, each twice-weekly PM interview will be with a selected artist from our 3rd Open Call Exhibition Celestial Opera, Human Cathedrals. We connect for this post with Adriana Gallo, an artist originally from Milan, whose work explores the esoteric and the material in her practice. Spanning across sculpture and site-specific installation, much of her practice studies the history of the grotesque and the ways traditional materials and icons can be re-contextualized through contemporary means of production and presentation. A bit more about Adriana:
Adriana Gallo b. 1993, graduated with her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. Gallo lives and works in New York with roots in Italy and New England. Recent residencies include: 77Art, Pocoapoco, Trestle Art Space, and Crit. She has exhibited in New York, Portland, Austin, Vermont, Oaxaca, Providence, and Massachusetts.
The small work selected for our Open Call show abstracts the many media used in ancient architecture to construct grottos and produce large scale al fresco murals. Here Adriana discusses further the theory and many influences behind her conceptual practice.
PP: Where do you live and how does it affect your practice/career? What's the creative community like there?
AG: I live in Brooklyn which is luckily enough where my friends are or at the very least somewhere they stop by often. I appreciate the practices of people in my life who are transparent about the ways they pay for their personal work and the labor necessary to strike a livable balance. New York is one of the harder places to strike that balance but is also the place where people feel the most comfortable articulating the compromises and sacrifices they make on a day to day basis.
PP: Who or what are major influences for you right now and why?
AG: I've been balancing texts that look outside of aesthetic or art theory like Silvia Federici's Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons and Pellegrino Artusi's Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well with the works of Mark Fisher and a really special book On the Grotesque by Geoffrey Galt Harpham.
PP: Current binge-worthy tv/film recommendation?
AG: John Berger's Ways of Seeing TV adaptation from the 70's or Monty Don's Italian Gardens (available on Netflix!)
portrait of the artist
detail of the installation from residency at 77Art
PP: If you had to pick a film that you feel inspires your practice in some way, which would it be and why?
AG: I've been watching and re-watching a number of Dario Argento's films. In exploring the Giallo genre of horror, he engages with a tension between the grotesque and the sublime that I consider in my own work. His films conditionally consider sound and landscape as fundamental narrative elements in such a way that if you remove any individual element the whole thing comes crashing down. Suspiria and its Goblin soundtrack is always a favorite, but Phenomena, set in rural Switzerland with a young Jennifer Connelly discovering her ability to psychically communicate with insects, was exactly what I needed to see a few months ago despite its plot holes.
PP: What's your favorite article of clothing to wear and why?
AG: I love a big pant and a baseball cap. I was gifted an Aperol branded baseball cap found on Ebay and it's an especially good (Aperol) orange.
PP: What are you listening to in your studio or when you work?
AG: Haruomi Hosono's album The Aegean Sea. I also listen to a lot of Dolly Parton and Abba
Adriana’s go-to meme
Padua No. 2, 2020, gesso, stucco patch, polymer clay, china marker, spray paint on wood panel, currently on view for Celestial Opera, Human Cathedrals
PP: Did you receive a formal education for the work you do currently? Either way, do you think it has supported/informed the outcome of your career and your future goals?
AG: I graduated in 2015 from RISD with my BFA. It was an incredibly formative time for me in that I had unlimited access to studios and a cohort of people who made that studio experience really productive. As with all higher education, the institution required a lot from students financially for access to the community and faculty. I have a low opinion of arts education in the US generally and the exclusivity baked into it. It's definitely an experience that has opened some doors for me but was also a place that failed to fully articulate the extent to which success outside of academia is ultimately a question of access to resources.
PP: What is a typical day in the life for you as a creative? How do you structure your day/week to manage your practice?
AG: I am fortunate to work from home to do design and art direction work to support myself, so I more or less spend the day in my studio hopping from task to task and alternating between my own practice and the work that sustains it. I take walks and take the time to make myself a simple lunch. I have a garden currently so a lot of my anxious energy is channeled into worrying about mites or watering schedules. I also watch a lot of youtube and take the occasional tiktok break where I've massaged the algorithm into showing me mostly frog content.
Natura Morta, 2020, sawhorse, paper pulp, cement pigment, ceramic fruit (lemon, plum, apple, orange, banana, pear), dimension variable
Practical Magic interviews post weekly on Thursdays - check back to see who we’re chatting with next.